But nothing about the recently mentioned https://cosmoe.org ?
Or their former port to run it atop of Linux, like hosted AROS, or plan 9 from userspace?
Of course, that version of the OS didn't do a whole lot. By the time R5 rolled around, the boot time had grown quite a bit. It was still damn fast though.
I remember years of avoiding DHCP because if the client daemon didn’t get a response boot would hang waiting for it to time out …
For reference, on that same PC I installed Win98 to play Baldur’s Gate. It bluescreened when I plugged in a Microsoft USB mouse. This was a representative experience.
The only "killer app/feature" I know of for Be/Haiku is https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/status.html a radio station automation program, and it's in a weird state where they can't provide hardware that works reliably.
So much great tech has been lost to aggressive business practices of entrenched companies it would have disrupted.
The theme has been repeated... repeatedly: VHS vs Beta being maybe the typically cited archetype of business model vs technical specs.
To me the dominant example in the world today though, is that s/w engineers continue to use windows 8-(
C:? Does anyone ever stop to think about the abstraction of a file system directory hierarchy? The whole point is to remove the specifics of the h/w implementing it, and provide a logical abstraction of nested "directories". Explicitly specifying drive "letters", is the opposite of that. The only reason it ever existed was because the primordial DOS didn't have the horsepower to manage something like a unix mount. But why do we still have it in 2025?
Business triumphs over technology.
One aspect of the article that didn't track my experience was the description of linux in 2015. By that point I had long ago settled onto the fluxbox window manager, because I didn't like the constant churn of "desktop environments". It all just seemed too much like windows.
In 2025 I'm still using it, and it's still exactly the same, which to me is one of it's greatest features. Personally, I don't want the latest brainchild of some UI engineer at Canonical disrupting my workflow.
This veto power of equity over technical possibility is the story of modern tech development. Cory Doctorow cites this 2014 article in his post today:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
tl;dr US political policy making is 100% controlled by large financial equity stake holders. The support, for or against, a policy by the overwhelming majority of the population has a 0% effect.
This is also true of corporate decisions. "Innovation" is pursued if and only if it benefits equity, regardless of potential advantages to users, or the progress of the tech itself.
Later on, when hard drives were common, people still used things like floppies and optical media. Drive letters were still more meaningful in that context. Drive letters started losing their relevance with USB mass storage (especially when the media was the device), and are minimally relevant today (when external storage is far more likely to be on the network).
The lack of proper abstraction sucks when you have multiple hard drives, but I'm pretty sure that Windows has taken care of that from several angles. Those features simply aren't used often. (And, since I'm not a Windows user, take that bit with a grain of salt.)
leakycap•4h ago
After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix.
It was wild to know NeXT had made inroads so many places. I imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with AT&T when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it. They already saw he could deliver for them on a B&W NeXT-based product used well into the 2000s.
orangecat•3h ago
No kidding. It took until the M1 to make macOS feel anything close to the responsiveness of BeOS on a 150MHz PowerPC.
ksec•3h ago
leakycap•1h ago
Nothing else is as fast, I don't get slowed down by it
Even cursor movement on modern macOS is slow
loloquwowndueo•1h ago
WillAdams•1h ago
ksec•3h ago
Well iPhone was launched with Cingular, which wasn't AT&T at the time.
leakycap•1h ago
New AT&T Wireless bought Cingular later
betamaxthetape•58m ago
Oh, I would absolutely love to know more details about this. I'm fascinated by the history of telecoms. Would you consider writing a blog post about it? (Or if you prefer, my email is in my profile!)